In the discussion, Justice Stevens lamented a raft of Supreme Court decisions he said had expanded application of capital punishment, criticized the "textualist" legal approach championed by Justice Antonin Scalia and defended the opinion that most alienated him from many of his liberal admirers

I'd note for what it's worth that a "textualist" like you ought to take Joseph's straight quote of 4(A)(1) and distinguishing of it from 4(A)(2) to be dispositive, and I've dealt with the commentary above.

Among them are Jack Goldsmith, a former Bush White House lawyer and leading skeptic of international law, and John Manning, an administrative law expert and constitutional scholar of the "textualist" school.

Perhaps most important, in the end, progressives can take heart from the fact that a well-reasoned, textualist argument can win cases for the little guy in the Supreme Court, even from conservative Justices -- the Lanning majority opinion, after all, was authored by Justice Samuel Alito, and joined not just by the more liberal wing of the Court but also every conservative Justice except Scalia.

This would be quite unremarkable -- judges frequently disagree about what the particular text of a statute or constitutional provision means, and they often write separate opinions trying to convince their colleagues and posterity that their interpretation is the correct one -- if Justice Scalia did not try to claim the moral high ground as the Court's one true textualist.

Justice Scalia is famous for his oft-professed commitment to a strict textualist approach to judging, which, he asserts, not only has the benefit of being "easy as pie," but is also more respectful to the democratic processes that created the text of the Constitution or particular statutory language.